Sam Hodge

I am a visual artist painting and printing with found and waste materials. Through my focus on transformations in matter over time I explore human entanglement with the material world and our reaction to its shifting and unstable nature. I find emergent patterns of growth and disintegration in paint and print processes that echo those found in the geological or biological systems. I interact with the dynamic and generative properties of paint, pouring it onto the support and tipping it so that rivulets erode the paint, pulling it apart to create branching patterns of ridges or allowing the paint to pool and settle, diffuse or crack as it dries. I do not regard paintings as static, passive objects, but expect them to continue changing slowly throughout their lifetimes and I am interested attitudes to ephemerality such as fading in my work. I often make my own pigments, paints and inks from found materials such as earth, plants and the detritus left by human activity. This connects my work directly to the geological, biological and human stories embodied in the landscapes that I have walked through.

On my urban and coastal walks I am drawn to discarded human-made objects, particularly those that have been metamorphosed by processes of accident or weathering into ambiguous and animated forms. Across a variety of timescales, these objects tell stories of the materials and people that make them and of how materials make humans and their societies. When they are finally thrown ‘away’ they begin an existence of their own, changing and being changed by the environment. I respond to these objects using a mixture of drawing, photographic processes and direct impressions etched and pressed into printing plates (in a manner analogous to fossilisation). In this way I create images that draw attention to the organic, animate nature of these transforming things.

[image: 1046 Carboniferous]

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